Recognition of the 3-D motion of a human arm with HIGIPS

This paper gives an overview of HIGIPS design concepts and prototype HIGIPS configuration, and discusses its application to recognition of the 3-D motion of a human arm. HIGIPS which employs the combination of pipeline architecture and multiprocessor architecture, is a high-speed, high-performance and low cost N * M multimicroprocessor parallel machine, where N is the number of pipeline stages and M is the number of processors in each stage. The algorithm to recognize the motion of a human arm with a single TV camera was developed on personal computer (NEC PC9801 series). As a constraint condition, some simple ring marks are used. Each joint of the arm is attached with a ring mark to obtain its centroid position when the arm moves. These centroid positions in the three-dimensional space are linked at each of the successive pictures of the moving arm to recover its overall motion. This algorithm takes about 2 seconds to process one image frame on the general-purpose personal computer. This paper mainly discuses how to partition this algorithm and execute on HIGIPS, and shows the speed up. From this application, it is clear that HIGIPS is an efficient machine for image processing and recognizing.